The Werewolf of Paris: A Novel

In this gripping work of historical fiction, Endore's werewolf, an outcast named Bertrand Caillet, travels across pre-Revolutionary France seeking to calm the beast within. Stunning in its sexual frankness and eerie, fog-enshrouded visions, this audiobook was decidedly influential for the generations of horror and science fiction authors who came afterward.

this is not just a blood and guts werewolf story, though there are some moments. it's much more of a psychological study and a biographical history of an individual that becomes a werewolf, and initially we get his ancestor's story for a stretch before he even comes into the story. it may not be fast paced enough for Twilight crowd but I thought there were some interesting things in it, and it is one of the "original" werewolf stories that laid the foundation for much that came after. with some modernization it could be done very well as a film. & was the basis for the Oliver Reed werewolf film. for being written in 1933 it had some elements that surprised me. it is always interesting to me to find in some old lit tidbits of history or even "pop" culture, for example how early a word or phrase was used that i thought was modern or even how long ago Coke was popular etc. probably not going to be a favorite among the MTV generation

The Late Mr. Shakespeare: A Novel

Our guide to the life of the Bard is an actor called Pickleherring, who asserts that as a boy he was an original member of Shakespeare's acting troupe. In an attic above a brothel in Restoration London - a half century after Shakespeare has departed the stage - Pickleherring, now an old man, sits down to write the full story of his former friend, mentor, and master. Fond, faithful Pickleherring has forgotten nothing over the years, and using sources both firsthand and far-fetched he means to set the record straight.

I came to this just after Will In The World an excellent biography and well known and then this novel is a perfect "continuation" if you will. It is hilarious at times and bawdy and plays with the WS mythology and history and is obviously as well researched and knowledgable concerning WS as a straight bio. If you can and you're a big WS fan/buff I'd say do the 2 together as I did.

Calculating God

In this Hugo-nominated novel, an alien walks into a museum and asks if he can see a paleontologist. But the arachnid ET hasn't come aboard a rowboat with the Pope and Stephen Hawking (although His Holiness does request an audience later). Landing at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the spacefarer, Hollus, asks to compare notes on mass extinctions with resident dino-scientist Thomas Jericho.

this was a very well researched and scientifically based exploration of what first contact might mean and the possibility of a "creator", but it's not the silly biblical mythology but a much more thought provoking debate about evidence and purpose on a universal scale, not a tiny earthly point of view. 2 other friends really liked that aspect as well and I've recommended it to a 3rd and will others. nice to think about these things intelligently and not superstitiously.

Macbeth

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

this version seems so wooden compared to other versions i have or have seen. while it has the merits of the players enunciating clearly and so dialogue is reasonably easy to follow, I found the acting to be very uninspired and Macbeth has so many great lines and speeches but actor in Mac's role seemed at times to be reading from a page in front of him as if he was seeing it for first time. Macbeth is perhaps my favorite play and I have seen or listened to some interesting performances, but this was disappointing to me.

BBC Radio Shakespeare: Hamlet (Dramatized)

BBC Radio has a unique heritage when it comes to Shakespeare. Since 1923, when the newly formed company broadcast its first full-length play, generations of actors and producers have honed and perfected the craft of making Shakespeare to be heard.

I've recently listened to several of the plays and this Hamlet a few times in past couple of weeks and I have to say this is a very good version: well acted, nice production and vigorous performances that I liked for Hamlet and Claudius particularly. The man in Claudius role sounds like James Mason. All in all a good performance. & as much as I respect Gielgud his audio version here feels so slow and ponderous that I have trouble with it. I also like the Branagh film version very much with a couple of caveats, but accessible. All the plays can be performed with such a range of approach that it is informative to pick up on a different intonation/emphasis of even a single word that makes you think, wait a minute, I never realized that aspect before, or that's a new approach. Literally a "poem unlimited."

Catch-22

Catch-22 is set in the closing months of World War II, in an American bomber squadron on a small island off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn't even met keep trying to kill him. (He has decided to live forever, even if he has to die in the attempt.)

In the 1st half I was literally laughing out loud and so hard that I had to stop my vehicle and wipe my eyes, I could not see to drive. I thought someone would come out and ask if I was all right or why I was crying. I found so much in the 1st half that was hilarious.

I really enjoyed the military bureaucracy idiots and paranoia and backstabbing etc. and the just plain absurdity at times. & it was neat to see how tidbits and seeds planted from opening pages filter through or even come back on someone later with a vengeance. 2nd half gets progressively more serious and whole novel deals with several big issues. Late in novel there is Chapter 39: The Eternal City, that devolves into a Heironymus Boschian nightmarish/hellish landscape. Yossarian is/becomes the conscience of the novel.

Parts of C22 make me think of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 & Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. & Milo Minderbinder's Syndicate seems a precursor to Haliburton and modern war profiteering. Also wondering if Pynchon's Yoyodyne from V and GR is in anyway a nod to Yossarian's nickname Yoyo. He is yoyo-ing back and forth and not getting anywhere due to C22.

I feel the overlap/repetitious nature of some of the chapters lends a spiral structure, but I don’t know what you could cut out without a complete rewrite and removal of characters as so many stories interlace and so many characters interact. I felt an affinity with Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude regarding this wherein the cyclic/spiral nature of the story that slowly moves forward but retraces elements reflects the trapped nature of the characters.

I agree that military double talk and cross-talk is a bit repetitive it was still at least amusing in 2nd half. But for some this stuff may get to be too much of a good thing.

There is more to it than just the absurdity too as there are many bits regarding life and death and ruminations and questioning of religion etc by the chaplain that are rather existential and I liked that. Some nature of reality stuff too maybe regarding his deja vu ponderings.

The 1st half had all the real gut busting hilarious stuff for me but there are 2nd half moments where I still chuckled. I enjoyed the absurd landscape Heller created even more than first time I listened several years ago.

Morality Play

It is the late 14th century, a dangerous time beset by war and plague. Nicholas Barber, a young and wayward cleric, stumbles across a group of travelling players and compounds his sins by joining them. Yet the town where they perform reveals another drama: a young woman is to be hanged for the murder of a 12-year-old boy. What better way to increase their takings than to make a new play, to enact the murder of Thomas Wells?

But as the actors rehearse, they discover that the truth about the boy's death has yet to be revealed.

This is a very good historical mystery around time of Black Death in Europe. There is a murder mystery coupled with a tale of a traveling acting troop and a "defrocked" clergyman who joins up and gets involved in acting and writing plays, acting being one of the sins he is not to participate in normally. But he is drawn to it slowly and suffers some mental anguish over his choice to remain with them. There is more to his story that adds weight to whole novel. I like the atmosphere of the story taking place in medieval times, but more importantly it plays with the idea of how morality and religious dramas grew into actual dramatic creativity freeing themselves from shackles of repeating same old biblical tales etc. I always find items of that nature interesting: the speculation on how drama and literature developed from greek drama or earlier mythic rituals, into mystery and morality plays, and into drama as we know it today.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

I love Nabokov, but I will admit that this is not one that will draw people to him. I think he is a genius, with some of the most beautiful writing and style, and Lolita was a revelation to me: the word play, the love of language, the literary allusions. But with Ada, we have his Ulysses, which makes it a little difficult to follow at times.

It's even hard to describe the "plot" as such; it is a biography of Van & Ada written by Van, with "interruptions" by Ada, & the editor at times, with perhaps some typos by the typist... Basically it is a sprawling chronicle of Van & Ada's lives, and of their love (very sexual at times) for each other.

I want people to read him and listen to his works, but I would start with the more straightforward and accessible novels: King Queen Knave, Laughter in the Dark, Defense, Mary, and Lolita, and get a feel for the poetic style and the way he uses different forms to reflect the content (one of the things i love) and then go on to more experimentally styled work: Invitation to a Beheading (a favorite of mine & which a friend also loved), Bend Sinister (great title, great book) Pale Fire.....

Actually, this novel (& Nabokov) makes me wish America had a more European attitude towards education and other cultures and then anyone could grasp so much more of it.

And listening to it, you miss a lot of the word play. I read it some time ago and liked it and caught some of the play, and I caught other things this time, but there is soooo much of it; literally almost every sentence has some play or allusion.

I think Ada is a bit like Ulysses. You can follow parts of the story, and I don’t think it’s as bad as Ulysses, but it is so densely packed with wordplay, and puns, and funny names, and allusions to myriad things from obscure sex words to other Nabokov novels and characters, to historical and literary characters and Russian, French, British and American literature to the point that almost every line or word has multiple lines of play woven in. In that sense it is like Ulysses.

That said, there are several moments where when you pick up on something it is very funny and I have been laughing out loud a couple times, but still so much got by me.

There is a web site Ada Online striving to annotate the whole novel and if you check it out just look at the first page and you'll see what's behind the scene so to speak.

Lolita is actually very much like Ada in this respect but the narrative “through line” is actually followable if you don’t catch any of the play.

I was thinking today that he may be the most brilliant author I’ve read or heard of. the depth of his knowledge in so many areas is phenomenal, not to mention his discovery and naming of a butterfly and all that scientific lingo. He knows fluently enough to play and pun etc in Russian, French, English, with at least a bit of German, Spanish, Latin, probably Greek and touching on Old English & I think a little Norse in Pale Fire and who knows what else, and sometimes he's punning and playing across 2-3 languages within a single word or line.

It is rather daunting and humbling reading him, especially Ada and Lolita, but he is more fun to me than Joyce because you can follow so much of his stories to some degree. and looking up annotations and stuff for his work is like a school lesson in itself.

Ada is the most densely allusive and punning of all his work I believe. (it’s amazing to me all the scholars who are sifting through his stuff and finding new allusions and connections and word play everyday in multiple languages, how can any one mind connect all this? If you're interested check out Zembla, a site full of VN info and links and criticism)

& he’s always parodying authors and some come in for a rough time, as in this bit from Ada about TS Eliot, a favorite target : “…a banker who at 65 had become an avant-garde author; in the course of one miraculous year he had produced The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits…”

i like to study him because I learn so much. but there is a point at which with certain works, (and Ada, and Ulysses are examples and we can name others) the only people who can instantly grasp them and love them are scholars.

the thrill i felt first reading Lolita and Defense and other VN was a revelation really, such exuberant love of words and literature, and then I also love the way, more than anyone else i knew of, that he tried to find a form for his novel that reflected the content in some way, Pale Fire being the most obvious example of that. (as is Faulkner's Sound and Fury & I think Melville's Moby Dick and Kosinski's Painted Bird, and I could go on )

i think that with experimentation you still need a character to feel for, and lacking that you can become less engaged emotionally even though you admire the experimentation. I think that is one criticism of VN, especially his work like Ada, where the game is more important, at least it seems, than the characters. Lolita even with the game still enthralled me and I “connected” with Humbert and Lolita, they are great personalities that still dominate the game and don’t get lost in the word play.

finally I have to say I'm not too enamored with this narrator; his voice is a bit too dry, and he doesn't get into the language and voices very well. I think Jeremy Irons did a magnificent reading of Lolita, and I wish they had found someone of that caliber for all of Nabokov. Some of the narrators are very good with Nabokov's work, but some leave me wishing...

The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy

Bringing his twin gifts of scientific speculation and scathing satire to bear on that hapless planet, Earth, Lem sends his unlucky cosmonaut, Ijon Tichy, to the Eighth Futurological Congress. Caught up in local revolution, Tichy is shot and so critically wounded that he is flashfrozen to await a future cure.

This is a very enjoyable quick book. There is so much packed into it that my interest never flagged. In fact, there are numerous ideas that could have generated at least short stories of their own, but they are only a part of this world.

I found myself thinking of many different novels that at least share an idea with this, enough so that I began to wonder how many authors and filmmakers perhaps read this and were influenced. There are moments like Stand on Zanzibar but crossed with Vonnegut. I thought of Inception, the Manual of Detection, Philip K. Dick, Matrix, with some Nabokovian wordplay tossed in.

Funny in places, thought provoking in others. For a novel written in 1971 (and translated In 1974) I thought there was a lot of great satire about the direction society was/is heading and it is surprisingly relevant to current society in many ways, and I think there are many serious cautionary items blended into the fabric of the world of the novel.

Here's one sample: Lubricrat: one who gives bribes. Derived from "greasing" of palms.

Tell me that's not applicable to our entire system of government, summed up in one word.

I'm not going to spoil anything, so have fun with it, I did.

Also, there's a movie coming soon, The Congress, which looks interesting, but from the movie blurb, it does not appear it will follow the novel. It may be they seized upon some element and developed something, we'll see. As I said, there are so many ideas which could easily be developed into some tangential story.

Flash and Filigree

Dr. Frederick Eichner, world-renowned dermatologist, is visited by the entrancingly irritating Felix Treevly who comes to him as a patient and stays as an obsession. Prosaic incidents blossom into bizarre developments with the sharpened reality of dreams as the spectral Mr. Treevly leads the doctor into a series of increasingly weird situations. With the assistance of a drunken private detective, a mad judge, a car crash, a game show called What’s My Disease, and a hashish party, Treevly drives Eichner to madness and mayhem.

i didn't find this to be all that good actually. I liked Candy and Magic Christian which I read some time ago, and of course his work on Strangelove, but this seemed a little flat.

I kept thinking of Paddy Chayefsky and his dark humor and satire I think due to the Hospital film with GC Scott. The doctor in this is the best part, and even that could have been ramped up a bit. what this book lacks could very easily have been supplied by beefing up the doctor, which sounds odd since the story revolves around him, but something felt missing to me. it starts well and funny.

There is a very good courtroom scene early on where the doctor weasels out of trouble or at least tries to. That is done perfectly and is applicable to current times with all the double speak of corporations and politicians and I wish that line had been the whole novel. the alternating story fell flat for me.

it is short and so not a great expenditure of time if you want to try it.

Child 44

It is a society that is, officially, a paradise. Superior to the decadent West, Stalin's Soviet Union is a haven for its citizens, providing for all of their needs: education, health care, security. In exchange, all that is required is their hard work, and their loyalty and faith to the Soviet State. But now a murderer is on the loose.

I like the 1984 crossed with Dragon Tattoo aspect, with a little Gorky Park, and Silence of the Lambs, and Fatherland and episodic structure a bit like Red October with the movement in time and place.

this is a good mystery thriller/detective story and does it's job effectively. I can't rave about it due to fact it does ultimately follow the template of mystery/thriller genre (serial killer, clues, doubters, race against time) and though it doesn't do anything exceptional it does have some good characters, (couple of very good villains who are not the murderer). there are some formulaic aspects, but there are a few surprises along the way.

one thing i liked was that there are very few good guys actually, and a case could be made that there are none. this is partially due to the people being stuck in the repressive society which dictates their actions and controls their thinking.

actually, my favorite thing about this is the depiction of life within a dictatorship and the methods by which those at the top control everyone and information and the daily life struggle just to survive when you can't trust anyone. i think that part of the story was more engaging to me than the mystery part, actually there are a couple things regarding that i found to be a bit forced and too coincidental for my taste. but it is a page turner in many ways.

& it does seem at least to be well researched and author seems to be knowledgeable about Russia and it's political situation at the time. it appears to be the start of what might be a good detective series based in Russia of the 50s and 60s

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